‘Backrooms’ director Kane Parsons joins anti-AI leagues: “Cultural rot”
Backrooms director Kane Parsons has joined the anti-AI leagues, describing the technology as “cultural and economic rot”.
The filmmaker, who rose to prominence on YouTube as a teenager, recently made history as the youngest-ever director to top the box office, setting a new record for A24 for the largest opening weekend in their history for his liminal horror, Backrooms, starring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve.
In a recent interview with The Australian, the director shared his feelings about AI, as the technology begins to seep into the industry at an unprecedented rate.
Parsons began, “I think I’m in the same boat as most well-adjusted people. If I could snap my fingers and make generative AI disappear forever, I probably would.”
He added, “Creatively, I get no enjoyment from using those tools. It defeats the purpose entirely for me.”
Instead, Parsons enjoys culturally investigating the new appetite for AI: “What interests me more is interrogating it artistically. We already live in a world where you walk outside, and there are billboards and signs that are obvious AI slop. That’s become part of our visual reality.”
Therefore, Parsons rejects the idea that AI enables greater innovation, adding, “To me, generative AI feels less like innovation than a symptom of a broader cultural and economic rot.”
From here, Parsons is interested in artistically rendering the cultural impact of AI: “I’m interested in using that iconography in art, he shared, “not using AI to make the art itself, but examining what it represents. I definitely want to explore it further in future projects.”
The film industry has begun to embrace AI from surprising corners: coveted Taxi Driver director Martin Scorsese recently endorsed AI after it was announced that he had become a partner of the image generation company, Black Forest Labs.
Elsewhere, filmmakers are using AI as a tool to resurrect performers from the dead; most notably, Val Kilmer is set to lead a new movie, As Deep as the Grave, despite his death in 2025.
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